Hunger Grows in Locked-Down Shanghai
The entirety of Shanghai is now under lockdown after a previous experiment to shut the city down one half at a time failed to contain a growing COVID-19 outbreak. Some residents have now been under lockdown for over three weeks, with a succession of smaller lockdowns limited to particular districts or compounds. In China, lockdowns are stricter than in many other countries: It can entail a complete ban on leaving one’s home or being limited to one excursion every few days for food.
National coronavirus cases continue to climb steadily, with numbers doubling roughly every five days. Shanghai remains the epicenter of the outbreak, with over 83 percent of cases, although numbers are also growing in neighboring provinces. Mass testing in the city is uncovering a very high number of asymptomatic cases, suggesting that other regions with lower rates of testing probably have large numbers of undetected cases. (China also uses a very particular definition of “asymptomatic” cases, excluding many that would be considered symptomatic in other countries.) The number of deaths remains officially very low, though deaths in old age facilities are likely being underreported.
But the main concern for most Shanghai residents isn’t COVID-19—it’s food. While supply chains and food deliveries, either through commercial services or government-provided packages, held up reasonably well during previous lockdowns, the Shanghai situation has been a disaster. Supermarket shelves are empty, government deliveries inadequate, and commercial services completely overwhelmed; ordering online requires getting up in the early hours of the morning and hoping you’re one of the lucky few who gets through before orders are suspended.
The food scarcity is severe enough that some people are foraging, resulting in cases of food poisoning. Residents are swapping tips online for making vegetables last longer or preparing food that’s past its sell-by date. Unofficial shops have sprung up run by those who stockpiled over the winter, while there have been breakouts from locked-down compounds to buy supplies. Chinese water is not drinkable from the tap, and households usually rely on regular deliveries of bottled water; only a small percentage of upper-middle-class homes have filters as an alternative. Boiling water tackles bacteria but doesn’t remove other pollutants.
It’s unclear why the logistics of this lockdown have failed. One reason may be inconsistency, with delivery services and shops uncertain about what the measures would be from one day to the next. A desire to keep the city isolated has also affected trucking, with some drivers forced to undergo two-week quarantines, and freight prices soaring. Drivers are demanding extra pay of up to 2,000 yuan—over $300, a substantial amount in a poorly paid industry—or refusing trips to Shanghai altogether. Shanghai is also the most important port in China, and the delays there are causing supply chain issues downstream.
Conditions in Shanghai’s isolation wards are worsening, with reports of food and water shortages and fighting among residents. The authorities have just reversed policy on one of the worst decisions, the separation of children from uninfected parents, after a wave of online anger. The sporadic killing of dogs in coronavirus-hit households—not official policy, except briefly in one city—has also prompted rage. Lockdowns of hospitals and prioritization of COVID-19 testing have also caused serious health care problems, while an angry call from an official at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention complaining about government policies went viral before being censored.
The latest round of lockdowns and coverage seems to have prompted a change in public attitudes toward COVID-19 policy. Over the last two years—with the usual caveats that Chinese opinion is hard to gauge—there’s been broad support for the zero-COVID-19 policy as the pandemic claimed millions of lives in other countries. Nationalists pointed to the policy as a sign of the supposed superiority of Chinese governance. Today, complaints about the policy and discussions of the openness of other countries seriously outnumber _expression_ of support—even from people who are generally strong supporters of the government.
But despite all this, it seems unlikely that the government will abandon zero-case targets any time soon. An editorial by one of China’s vice premiers, Sun Chunlan, emphasized “unswerving adherence” to zero-COVID-19. This is a politically tricky year for Xi Jinping, as the Chinese president secures his third term in power—an important break with previous norms that effectively sets him up as a permanent dictator. Other officials are on edge as a result. That means that stability is top of the agenda—and that nobody can take the risk of veering away from established policy.